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"...syncopation, in which notes appear like hobgoblins where you don't expect them, and vanish just as startlingly..."

"Yves Saint Laurent's Opium is minus any verbal slogan, but its accompanying photograph of a beautiful woman in a gold-lamé suit, lying half dead in an opium delirium on a bed of orchids, makes its own perverse statement."

"For a moment, the two of them maintained eye contact and smiled at each other. Then, before the situation became more emotionally complicated, Arthur excused himself to go take a shower."

Loving every minute of this. Posting about it at www.instagram.com/Andrew.Berman

"I've grown up a good deal." / "At a certain amount of expense to the world."

Poor kitty.

"Darling, have you been? Their gruel? Simply too delicious. We ate our entire meal languishing in their adorable little debtor's prison in the basement, and then the children died of rickets! Divine!" Rakoff encounters a restaurant called "Peasant."

"It has been a good while since 12:00 a.m. held much attraction for me beyond being a perfectly lovely time to be ensconced in the comfort of my home, sitting in my underpants, contentedly worrying about something."

From "Sesión Privada": "According to the producer, men can look at naked women for just so long. This is news to me. I don't mean that snidely, it is simply news to me. I don't look at naked women."

From "What Is the Sound of One Hand Shopping?": "...faking a coughing fit or simply bleeding from the eyes..." as ways to avoid unwanted conversations; "...crossed over into a realm of narcissism so overwhelming as to make the act of masturbation look selfless."

In chapter ten we learn that Stephen Sondheim prefers the Blackwing soft lead pencil, that there is such a thing as an artisanal pencil-sharpening service, and that the metal band holding the eraser on the end of a standard no. 2 pencil is called a "ferrule."

"Some may say I should get a life and get out more but if I got out more and saw place names with no apostrophes where there should be I shudder to think how I'd react." Ashburton proofreader Mary de Vere Taylor on a ban on apostrophes in place names in England in 2013.

Twist ending: copy editor badgers style editor in the elevator for a final ruling on The New Yorker's use of the diaeresis, style editor acquiesces saying he'll issue a memo soon, style editor DIES, still no resolution on the issue 37 years later.

She's working at a level of detail way beyond what is required for my job, but it's still good reading for a grammar nerd. Plenty of neat stuff in the comma chapter (chapter 5) but I forgot to note any of it. In chapter 6, she summarizes the hyphen usage philosophy of Edward Teall, author of "Meet Mr. Hyphen": "follow some rules, sure, but in the end what you're after is clarity of meaning." (Works for commas, too.)

Two from chapter four: "Just put the key in the ignition and turn it." Norris' father's advice that, like the English language, you don't need to understand how a car works in order to use it; "And when Mr. Burns, on 'The Simpsons,' finds out that Homer's father, Abe Simpson, used to wrestle under the name Raging Abe, and shouts 'You were he!' his excellent grammar marks him as a villain."

Another gem from chapter two: "...if he should ever read this I just want to say I'm still available." Norris, decades after Philip Roth wrote "Who is this woman? And will she come live with me?" in response to a vital edit she made to his work. Also: Norris, Roth, and I can all apparently relate to having to "schlep" (her word, and the only appropriate one) a harp all over town.

I can tell this is the kind of book I'm going to have to keep putting down so I can take notes. The first few pages of chapter two demystify the differences between "whatever"/"what ever" and "that"/"which", and also this: "I don't make a habit of correcting people in conversation or in print–unless it's for publication and they ask for it, or I'm getting paid." on the stigma associated with being a copy editor.

Two items from the first chapter: Webster published his first American English dictionary in New Haven and is buried near Yale; and the editors at The New Yorker nickname the various Webster dictionaries with the name "Web" ("Little Red Web," "Web II," "Web 3") but do not call the online version "Web Web." :/

"We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing them becomes too high..."

And now, a goat.

"She did not, he noticed, smell of stale excrement the way most people did." Reality in post-Arthurian England.

A dispute between a knight, a soldier, and a warrior, on page 120, is the first interesting thing to happen in this book.

Smell-face: 1. The olfactory imprint a person's scent makes on your brain, which may cause you to recognize them by smell. 2. A person you objectively don't like.

"I wasn't fully alive until the wrigglies got me." 90-year-old woman wishing not to be treated for neurosyphilis

Two quotes about George Washington: "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world." - George III, upon hearing that Washington intended to retire to his farm after the war; "They wanted me to be another Washington." - Napoleon Bonaparte, reflecting on his rule from exile in Elba.

More bile for the Chateau de Versailles: "...the woefully bedazzled ceilings of a grotesque hunting lodge gone wrong."

"You say to your soldier, 'Do this,' and he does it; but I am obliged to say, 'This is the reason why you ought to do that,' and THEN he does it." Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben on training the Continental Army

Reading about the Revolutionary War is a great way to learn the significance of NYC and DC street and subway station names.

"I do not think that there can ever be enough books about anything; and I say that knowing that some of them are going to be about Pilates." Vowell reacts to a Quaker's opinion that there are too many books about military history.

"'This simple and graceful shaft, made of terra cotta, at small cost, is a silent protest against extravagance and show in monuments.'" - A quaker monument to Lafayette